But I Digress...

chaos

2008-01-02T23:55:00.000-08:00

is often mistaken for profundity.

put me in coach / i'm ready to play, today

2007-08-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

I had the good luck to go to THE LONGEST 9-INNING BASEBALL GAME EVER (I don't think I exaggerate) a couple days ago; here is the photographic evidence:

The drive:

We're there!

Our seats:

My hair was pretty messy by this point.

But that's okay, because I had my hat. Physics always wins, you know.

The enemy. They'd jump up every time the Sox made a play. Understandable, but vexing.

The infamous beachballs!

I love these guys. Hearts to the field-cleaning guys.

Watching very seriously.

Uh-oh. And it was going so well.

Better warm up the lefty.

GA is a little bored out there in left field.

Then, a fight broke out! and another, and another, and another. As you can see, I have no picture of the fights, because I AM NOT AN IDIOT. However, here is a picture of the seats which the fighting people were ejected from. NOTE THE BABY. Thanks, assholes.

Boston fans are silly.

Yes! Yes! They're warming up K-Rod! He didn't pitch, though (they only put him in when winning or tied), but it was cool to watch him warm up.

And a cheerful picture of us losing. Yayyyy. (Frankly? By that point I was just glad it was over. Though I like baseball, I don't usually take it in 4-hour chunks.)

sundries

2007-08-01T20:49:00.000-07:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/Foureyedsnail/HowPeculiarItIsToBe17InTheSummertime

now do you believe in rock and roll

2007-06-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

can music save your mortal soul
and can you teach me how to dance real slow?

* * *

I got a guitar for a graduation present, a really beautiful thing it is. I need to name it (her), but not yet. Soon.

I'm good at becoming proficient at instruments (as with everything, my personality profile explains), but not far beyond. That's fine with me. I want to be able to say "I play the guitar" and mostly mean it.

I've fooled around with a lot of instruments in my life--played flute, sax, drums; feet are resting on a clarinet case; have fiddled with piano--but nothing quite stirs me like the instrument in my lap right now. Woodwinds can be beautiful haunting melodies or swinging jazz riffs, drums are instinctive and driving, piano is versatile; but nothing is like this.

Every chord I strike seems to ring pure and true right out of my childhood, vibrate out my fondest memories, the warm hum of bedtimes and lullabies, the soft low murmur of my father's voice.

Everything I pick up--bar chords, notes, melodies, harmonics, new songs, even just tuning the guitar--jostles me gently back into younger days, days when I would sit in bed and lie quite still, letting the notes and music wash over me, sometimes tearing up though I didn't know why, and thinking all the while that some day, I must learn how to do that, how to make those sounds. To play them for my children. Although my scratchy alto will never be my dad's soft baritone, I suppose.

I was a pensive, forward-thinking child, and now I'm a pensive, nostalgic teenager, so perhaps it's not that unusual for my past and future selves to meet each other, going opposite directions. Still, it's always a little odd when, guitars in hand, you make eye contact with yourself, nod, and walk on.

* * *

Go to sleep you weary hobo
Let the towns drift slowly by
Can't you hear the steel rails hummin'
That's the hobo's lullaby

* * *

I may be sappy over certain tunes, but my music tastes are still as offbeat as the rest of me. My iTunes is stuffed full of The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, The Who, Madeleine Peyroux, John Coltrane, and so on and so forth. More jazz than is probably normal. More Ani Difranco than is probably healthy. I create playlists not based on band or album, but by what goes together; what I like to listen to together.

One playlist is entitled Sad and is just for when I'm in those melancholy moods. It contains wailing blues, soft Brubeck tunes, Janis Joplin, and Death Cab for Cutie. It made sense at the time. And when the melancholy feeling comes, it makes sense again.

Another playlist is called House, the character, not the noun. It holds Miles Davis, the Raconteurs, the Who, and others. Songs about House, songs that House would listen to, songs that other folks suggested in their House fanmixes. "Tender to the Blues," "Devastation," "James!," "Desperado."

I dunno why I bother with these playlists, even, because more often than not when I get out Shelley, my iPod, I know exactly what song I want to listen to. I keep it on single-repeat because I like to hear the same song over and over again. I want to breathe in a song a dozen times, listen to each individual instrument, each little phrase. Catch the things that I've missed. Memorize the interplay between melodies and harmonies. Discover what the words say, and then what they mean. And then what they mean.

When I get a song stuck in my head, I don't just have the melody dancing in and out, one phrase over and over. I can hear everything from the soaring vocal line to the gently tapping cymbal, skipping again and again like a record. I have to carefully pick up the needle of my mind and set it at the beginning of the song, let it play all the way through, everything.

Singing aloud with music is intrinsically unsatisfactory, because with rare exception you can only sing one note at a time. (In my case, usually not even that.) I like singing along anyway.

* * *

dance me to the wedding, now, dance me on and on
dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
we're both of us beneath our love; we're both of us above
dance me to the end of love
dance me to the end of love

* * *

I'm not a terribly sad person, but my taste in music does tend to be a little doleful. Dunno why. Maybe rebelling against all the horrifically cheery tunes and Sousa marches they put you through in band?

I didn't even really know until one Mother's Day a couple years back; I was recording a few flute duets (with myself, haha) as my present and very frustrated with the recording equipment. My dad was slipping in and out of the garage, helping me and listening.

I hit the play button and let him hear my four tunes, the first three moderate-to-slow minor pieces, the last one a livelier, upbeat tune. "Oh, I like that one," he said, "the happy one. That's great, they're all great."

"I don't like the last one," I frowned, "it's hard; I keep messing it up."

He reassured me. "You can't tell. It's my favorite."

"You don't like the minor ones?" I asked, only half-seriously.

"I like them. They're very minor. Sad, you know."

I knew. But for the life of me I couldn't imagine why anyone would prefer the cheerful dueling flutes to the soft sad duets. They told a story in mournful vibrato (or they should have, I don't give my playing that much credit), while short and simple. How shallow major keys seemed in comparison! How mindlessly happy!

Then, probably, I gave too little credit to music's joyous romps. But even that playfulness wants a little dissonance. Sometimes.

* * *

i was standing on a noisy corner
waiting for the walking green
across the street he stood
and he played real good
on his clarinet, for free

* * *

Music theory was, without a doubt, the coolest part of jazz band (except for the improv, of course). Chord progressions and arpeggios and blue notes; lydian and mixolydian and dorian scales; minors and majors and dominant sevenths. I like knowing how things work, and my mind already liked breaking down music, so this came as quick and natural as a 12-bar blues.

It also helped, I think, that I'd been tapping out tsss-tkuh-tsss on a drumset, tap-dancing to Sinatra and his hep cat ilk, and humming along with 94.7 The Waaaaave's smooth jazz for as long as I could recall. Rhythm--or at least Western rhythm, or at least jazz rhythm--is in my blood and my toes and my head, so while some of my fellows were struggling with how to get eighth notes to syncopate I was trying to get them to swing.

As my dad will tell you, me playing an instrument without sheet music in front of me is rather notable. But I want to! Actually getting the technical skill down took a while, and I still haven't caught up, really. My mind is tired of waiting for my fingers to find the requisite speed for the licks I want to play. In my head I'm John Coltrane, Lester Young, oh why won't my fingers catch up?

* * *

i believe in harmony
i believe in christmas eve
free for all the happiness
and no one's living on their wits

* * *

I am a singularly annoying individual, when I'm listening to the radio, or my iPod, or a CD. Normally, I have the ability to multitask passably well (although my sister would put in that I can still be oblivious to her), but when I'm listening to music I'm absolutely idiotically single-minded. I cannot think of anything else. I am chagrined that I cannot put on tunes while doing my homework, or reading, or even now, writing this, but I can't unless it's the most boring elevator music ever. And what's the point in that?

The few times I've tried, recently, have been quite disastrous for whatever poor soul I was conversing with on AIM at the time:

Me: well, I'm listening to the same classic rock station I have since I was about 6, and I can recognize 90% of the songs
A: hahahahahah
Me: As I explained to Louise, I was listening to the greatest rock song ever written about chess
Me: and then i realized I knew that fact
Me: and sort of wondered what that meant.
A: that u know the greatest rock song ever?
Me: No, right now I'm listening to the greatest rock song ever
A: i really wouldnt know
Me: i want you to joiiiiiiiiiiiiiin together with the baaaaaaaand
Me: I saw this song in concert

There's a lot more, but then he started talking about Pokémon, which was fair, because I e-sang everything from the Rolling Stones to the Clash to Eric Clapton and back again. The chess song I was talking about was Your Move, by Yes, should anyone care--I've known the basic melody and the chorus for some time, but only when my dad called it "the greatest rock song ever written about chess" did it register that it was about chess.

All rock and roll was sort of like that, for me, only it usually wasn't about chess. It's most about sex and drugs and...well, rock and roll. The sudden flash of comprehension when you understand a song you've remembered from those early times; well, it's quite unique. Most rock doesn't have the complex harmonies that draw me in, or the enigmatic and linguistically clever lyrics which I seek out now. But those driving three-chord melodies still hit me in a simple place, an instinctive place, when the car speakers rattled and the wind whistled by and my dad sang along.

"How do you always know all the words?" I would ask, incredulously, as every song came up on that same radio station.

"I've just heard most of these songs many times," he would shrug, and smile, and sing.

Sometimes, when I knew the chorus, I'd raise my shrill little voice and sing along, probably massacring most of the lyrics dreadfully. Now, I've painstakingly looked up most lyrics I'm unsure about, and can guess or remember most of the rest. My voice is as shrill and enthusiastic as ever, though.

* * *

you don't have to play
you can follow or lead the way
won't you join together with the band
we don't know where we're going
but the season's right for knowing
won't you join together with the band

everybody join together
won't you join together
come on and join together with the band
everybody join together
won't you join together
come on and join together with the band.

year's end

2007-06-20T17:57:00.000-07:00

Went to the library with mum's class today.

The Many Emotions of a Graduate

2007-06-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

Sad.

Ecstatic.

Studious.

Serious.

Gangsta.
(My gangsta name is Cross-Eyed-Mo; wanna make somethin' of it?)

Sisterly affection.

Annoyance.
(but good hair)

Annoyance.
(with bad hair)

Prepared.

Gifted.
(that is my cousin Joe's hand)

Teary.
(well, technically, my nose was itching)

Musical.

Shrunk?!?!

ETA: Oh, and am in the paper again. Mostly, I think, because no one else would talk to the poor reporter, haha. But it's a very nice article and I do so love the first line.

Kimmy's Rice

2007-06-16T23:11:00.001-07:00

This is my favorite person in the whole wide world:

So, when I was gifted with a digital camera for graduation (thanks, Uncle Danny!) I thought to myself--Why not try to get a few good pictures of said favorite person?

Why not indeed.

Little did I know that my five-year-old godsister (that's someone who my parents are the godparents of, natch) has much the same attitude toward photographs that I do, only she is as usual much more effective.

As it turns out, she is an artful dodger

a brilliant hider

a master of disguise

and when all else fails, very, very fast.

She will flail and giggle

and attack fearsomely.

To try to convince her that my camera would not, in fact, capture her soul somehow, I handed it to her and showed her where the button was.

She proceeded to take some delightfully abstract photographs.

Still very little luck

on the photo-of-her front.

Such a dear, joyous, serious little person!

Here is the photo we posed for together, I think the only one where she was still.

Oh, irony.

when you are old and grey and full of sleep

2007-06-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

Here was my valedictorian speech:

Firstly, thank you, parents, teachers, administrators, and honored guests for joining us in celebrating this evening. Without all of you—and that means you, mom and dad—we could not be gathered here before you. And many thanks to our fine Pacifica band, for playing Pomp and Circumstance at least three dozen times.

Congratulations, class of 2007! Today, in just a few short minutes (depending on how long our speeches go), you will walk proudly up to this stage, receive your diplomas, and walk away as graduates of Pacifica High School, celebrating the fact that you have finished with your education forever.

Not so fast, class of 2007. Before you go off into the wide world and make your varied ways, I must stand here before you and shatter one of your most deeply held illusions. What I shall momentarily reveal is a secret so shocking, so earth-shattering that I’m sure it never crossed your minds even in your wildest imaginings.

You did not go to school to be given an education.

Now, before you cut my mike, allow me to explain.

You did not come to Pacifica High School to be given an education. You can scour the campus if you like, you will not find an education tucked into some yellowing book in the library. Nor will it be found in a freshly uncapped highlighter. An education doesn’t lurk in the back of some abandoned PE locker, or slink slimily out of the biology lab. It’s not even in the squiggles on the diploma you will receive today.

I say this not out of disrespect for Pacifica High School. PHS has given us all a number of priceless gifts—knowledge, experience, mentorship, and a haven for growth and experimentation. In short, schooling. But, as Mark Twain said, schooling should never interfere with our education. Schooling is something that happens to us. Education is something within us.

Long after we have forgotten the winner of the War of 1812, the difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, or what an introductory subordinating adverbial clause is, our education will remain. An education that Pacifica High School did not give us, but that this school helped us recognize in ourselves.

William Butler Yeats reminds us “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

We come here, fellow students, not as empty vessels, but as glowing embers. Each of us brought to this school our potential, our tiny wayward spark, and it was the job of our teachers to feed it with leaves and small twigs, to blow gently upon it, to sit in watchful vigilance over the emerging flames. Now, as we scatter, secure in the faith that each of us has had our passion, our curiosity, our thirst for knowledge ignited by our years here, we will recognize the pursuit of education as a virtue to be upheld for the rest of our lives. Thank you, Pacifica High School, for that.

The diploma that you will receive today does not say that you have learned all you need in life. It merely grants you the title of certified autodidact. And if you don’t know what that word means; I’m certainly not going to tell you—go look it up for yourselves.

There was a song I recall singing in kindergarten—I wonder if you remember? It went something like, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” A few months ago, I was singing that with a group of children who had absolutely no qualms about singing their hearts out. They sang without guile, without fear that they would be out of tune or that they wouldn’t know the words, that someone will make fun of them. They had no hesitation to put it all out there, improvise, try, fail, succeed, experience, and be themselves.

You have come full circle, class of 2007. You have learned much, experienced much, accomplished much. Your education has begun. Now it seems the best advice I can give you is the very same advice sung during those first days of kindergarten so long ago. Let it shine, class of 2007. Let it shine, let it shine.

10 Reasons why the Internet is Good (and Bad)

2007-05-29T16:35:00.000-07:00

10. The internet broadens your mind, offering different perspectives and increasing tolerance.

-10. The internet narrows your focus, allowing you the opportunity to insulate yourself with those who agree with you.

9. The internet is a egalitarian, it gives a voice to the silent, the downtrodden, and the quietly insightful.

-9. The internet is unregulated, it gives a voice to the extremists, the petty, and the zealously hateful.

8. The internet opens channels of communication for those of us who, whether by virtue of location, time constraints, or social awkwardness, would not otherwise find them.

-8. The internet cloisters us in an autistic society, neglecting normal, human methods of interaction until they become shriveled from disuse.

7. The internet provides mass distribution of petitions, manifestos, research, opinions, facts, news stories, and information.

-7. The internet provides mass distribution of rumors, lies, hate speech, propaganda, and pornography.

6. The internet allows for the interactive consumption of previously passive forms of media, such as television and radio, giving the listener more choice and less advertising, more multi-tasking and more time to enjoy.

-6. The internet's encouragement of "info-snacking," taking in media in bite-sized (byte-sized?) chunks pushes us to ever shorter attention spans and an even more ADHD society.

5. Every minute spent on the internet is a minute not spent in front of the television, in a gang, on the streets, doing drugs, loitering, shoplifting, drinking, partying wildly, or burning books.

-5. Every minute spent on the internet is a minute not spent playing an instrument, doing homework, dancing, philosophizing, teaching, eating, or reading a book.

4. The internet is bringing political protest, voting, involvement in the democratic process, and news to an entirely new generation and in an entirely new way.

-4. The internet is substituting virtual involvement for community involvement, idle talking for action.

3. The internet is new, constantly evolving, increasingly credible, and gains more power every day.

-3. The internet is vast, almost unregulated, and gains more power every day.

2. The internet creates a place for all of us who don't exactly fit in where we are.

-2. The internet discourages us from assimilating normally into our situations and lives.

1. The internet is unstoppable.

-1. The internet is unstoppable.

The Great Haircutting Experiment...

2007-05-27T12:19:00.000-07:00

View my new haircut adventures on Flickr.

Before:

After:

Initial results, as of yesterday.

Discarded results, of yesterday.

(There's the address of Locks of Love, on the post-it. My mother won't want to send it, but nothing's persuasive like, as House would say, bald cancer kids.)

(This is me when I rolled out of bed this morning, brushed it twice, and took a picture. In other words, how it'll look every day.)

Initial appearance, Day 2.

No products used.

Preparation: Took a shower, duration of 5 minutes.

Materials: (1) bottle of curly shampoo that smelled vaguely of citrus
(1) bottle of something oily supposed to help with the hairdrying
(1) bottle of mother's hairspray
(1) straight brush
(1) round brush
(1) hairdryer

Result after 10-15 minutes with hairdryer and brushes.

Hairdryer temperature = hot. Hairdryer setting = low; or so it claimed.

Result after application of hairspray and weird gel-like substance.

Conclusion: I like it. <3

Stand and Deliver.

2007-05-08T22:39:00.001-07:00

AP Calc test is tomorrow; I've been eschewing the (multiple) study parties, review sessions, and morale-boosting pizza-movie nights, despite the tempting allure of extra credit (and, well, pizza), pleading that I learn best alone. And by alone, I mean hardcore alone: solitary confinement in my room, papers and notebooks strewn about, four hours of problems and throwing practice tests at the walls as my scores get successively lower.

"I study best alone," I tell people, when they invite me to such studying soirées. It's half a truth, at best. I have no idea how I learn most effectively; whether these cram-sessions make any difference; whether it's sitting in class talking about the upcoming Harry Potter movie that subconsciously deposits information; whether I should consider sleeping on my books and letting it osmosize into my brain.

(My sister commented, at this, that unless there's water and a semipermeable membrane involved, nothing can osmosize at all. If it's something else, I should say diffusion.

Well, osmosize isn't a word anyway, I retorted brilliantly. I may or may not have stuck out my tongue.)

Tonight, though, after staying home to study all day, my ability to learn and retain is reaching a limit even as time t approaches infinity; so I thought, why not? And thus I sauntered over to the Calc Tune-Up study session at Borders.

That's only half a truth, as well. I went because (1) I needed to give Louise flashcards and a practice book I had sitting around; (2) I needed to get from Ashley my notes; (3) I needed to purchase a physics book for this weekend's cram-fest--and for summer study, embarrassingly enough; and (4) I wanted Mr. Guzik to answer a couple questions I had regarding intractable problems on the practice test.

Here is how that went:
(1) Check.
(2) No check, she left them at home--she offered to swing by but I told her no biggie, I probably had studied as much as humanly possible anyway.
(3) Check. I had a choice between a thin one and a thick one. I took the thick one, because I am a masochist.
(4) No check. Haha, he had no idea either--well, that's unkind of me, he had no idea on two, he helped me on one, and I figured out the other while explaining to him what I didn't understand.

But that is sort of beside the point, anyway; that's only half the reason I went. I sort of...wanted to see. If I actually did learn best solo.

They told us, at Caltech (and at everywhere else) that the first thing you do, if you don't want to die, is form a study group. Find people, get together, and put your collective mind to work on those hellish problem sets the teachers apparently dish out so cheerfully. Sometimes there's one genius kid who can do it on their own, the Caltechers said, but for the rest of us mortals we need help. I know I'm not a genius, and I certainly won't be anything close to a genius there, so no fear of that anomaly.

This made me sort of afraid. I've done things in groups, before, but I almost never learn anything in a group. We accomplish tasks in groups, do paired projects, edit each others' essays, present lectures together, but we don't...learn together. Or at least I don't. Even when we go places to study together--I feel like I'm talking and explaining and nodding too much and not asking enough questions. I don't want to sound like an ass. I sure as heck don't know everything, and I'm sure I don't know everything better than those in my study groups. I'm just...academically assertive? Bossy, probably. Bossy like Hermione, but without the redeeming ability to remember esoteric facts about Hogwarts history at key moments.

So yeah, I went to this today. To see. It's not an ideal situation to test it out in, really--I'm in BC, everyone else there was in AB. (I took that last year; my test covers that material and some additional stuff). So there weren't really any peers to help me, although man could I have used the help. God, I started forgetting trigonometric identities. You know you're bad off...

Anyway. I went. And you know what? It might just work.

I went and pulled up a table in the little Borders coffee-section, sat smack in the middle of about 10 kids with whom I have only the barest acquaintance (my closer friends were at a farther table), and just sort of observed. And did some problems of course. And chimed in with a bit of help whenever they needed me (not often, though I offered).

What an odd collection we must have been! Odd and annoying, probably, as our noise got progressively noisier. Ten people, all talking over and around and with each other, in numbers. Snatches, half a problem here, half a problem there; cutting in with a "No no no, d/dx [lnu] is u' / u...;" hoots of triumph at reaching a solution; groans of despair at comparing answers and not matching; anxious, wry comments about the upcoming test.

Yeah, I learned something. No, it wasn't math (although I did figure out what I was doing wrong in a couple of cases; thanks, Mr. Guzik.). I figured out that with the right circumstances, a motivated and bright group of people, everybody bringing something to the table, free samples of apple pie, and a bloody lot of scratch paper, it could work. It could really work for me. God, it's too bad I didn't go last year, or too bad I'm not in AB this year, or too bad more kids don't take BC, or something.

(It's always something like that. I'm like the only one I know of taking physics, so that'll be a lonely party no matter what. For government, Louise and I did a rapid-fire back-and-forth Q-and-A over the computer, but you know--the internet, right there, so tempting...haha.)

But, in any case, it reassures me. A lot. College is going to be so much harder that this, and this is already so hard. I feel sometimes like nothing is done in class and the homework teaches me nothing and it's just me, really, and the material to be learned, and what's wrong with me that I can't just learn it? Sometimes. Well, calculus is like that sorta all the time because it is just me, in essence.

I don't mean to mope. I found out something important and heartening today and I'm happy. Even if I have an AP test tomorrow, haha.

* * *

42 points if you catch this entry's title reference.

si tu veux que ma joie revienne...

2007-05-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

Olbermann is talking on the television six inches from my head. I can't make out the words but the sound is soothing.

I couldn't tell you what the first two AP tests were like, even if I weren't legally bound not to mention any specifics on the essays for several weeks, and not to mention ANYTHING about the multiple choice EVER. (That's the capslock of faint mocking, not the capslock of grave seriousness, btw. It might be self-evident but then it might not and my irony filters are completely closed for today. ) My brain is too fried to really remember.

I seared through the government test at speeds upwards of way too fast. Really, though, why did I bother studying about writs of mandamus and all the specifics of FDR's New Deal? When I finished the free response section with 40 minutes to spare I figured...well. Last night was a real waste, then.

Afterward, while waiting for everyone else to finish, me and Louise took the little white squares the seals came on (they make you seal the sections) and folded them into little flapping origami birds. Hers was, of course, quite perfect; mine had a wonky wing so it sort of limped along instead of flapping.

"It's a lame duck," proclaimed Louise, and I laughed more than is probably sane.

* * *

The French test was a nutella-and-cracker fueled marathon of listening and reading comprehension, essai-writing, and verb conjugations. Many completely stupid mistakes happened, some mine and some others', some that I can't divulge because they'd get me in trouble, others that I can't because they'd probably get my school in trouble.

Just kidding, AP board. Please don't invalidate my test. Totally just kidding.

I skated back and forth in my rolly-chair and craned my neck at the ceiling every time they told us to write our name and then look up. Childish, but one has to get through the time somehow. Then finally, after roughly 7 hours of AP testing (8 if you count breaks) they let us out of that freezing room into the burning sunlight and I hurried off to band practice.

ahh, I'm not going to miss this at all, dear high school.

Dead Week

2007-05-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Dead week for overachieving high school students, unlike college students, is not a well-defined week-long period of finals, but merely the nebulous roughly-two-week-long period which occurs in early May. It consists, of course, of AP tests, and studying for them; a costly pasttime which consists of much head-scratching and remarks like "I paid for this torture?" thus, preparing us all for college.

Myself, I have two tests on Monday, US Government and French, alors, j'ai beaucoup étudié le français aujourd'hui; aussi j'ai lu un article sur la course presidentialle française pour aider un peu avec le gouvernement...

Wednesday is Calculus; Thursday, Eng Lit; next Monday, Physics; that Thursday, Econ. The order is close to ideal, really, save that first marathon-day on Monday--seven hours of testing, three hours of band rehearsal, and nary a stop for meals in-between: but I can figure that one out, people are fairly understanding, really, if you phrase it nicely.

I really have nothing to say, I just needed to take a break for a while, but I find the motions of typing very soothing. I've gone from being one of those people who loves the sound of her own voice to one of those people who loves the sound of her own voice AND the pleasant clicky-clack of her laptop keyboard. Damn the backspace key, full speed ahead!

You'll pardon the rambling, I hope. Anything to keep me from trying to figure out Campaign Finance Reform. I have a hunch that might be an essay question, and I usually trust my hunches--I was right about the xylem and phloem question in 10th grade, after all.
I understand there's a new book out, by the way, about hunches and why they're good, Blink, or something? It was on Colbert.

Okay okay, I must go. I'm not sure when to use the subjonctif and I don't remember what Engel v. Vitale was and I feel like I need to review, er, integral calculus. HEAVENS, haha.

15 minutes...14 minutes 59 seconds...

2007-05-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

A story and a picture in the paper today, about me; I am pleased and only sort of embarrassed, haha. :)

Although I'm not sure what the proper response to "I saw you in the paper today!" is. Thank you? I suppose it's thank you. I was busy today trying to remember to make eye contact when shaking hands. And with denying people signatures on the newspapers which were suddenly everywhere. COME COME now, I can't become a Lockhart with my momentary fame.

Now, I must off to study: glowing newspaper articles aside, I am not some sort of genius that does not need to read over my notes before AP testing starts next week. :P

National Day of Silence

2007-04-18T18:02:00.000-07:00

GLSEN’s 2005 National School Climate Survey found that more than 64% of LGBT students report verbal, sexual or physical harassment at school and 29% report missing at least a day of school in the past month out of fear for their personal safety. The Day of Silence is one way students and their allies are making anti-LGBT bullying, harassment and name-calling unacceptable in America’s schools.

* * *

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute. ~Josh Billings

* * *

Today, Wednesday, April 18, 2007, was the 11th annual National Day of Silence, and the first one I've participated in. Last year I missed it and regretted it very much; this year I only happened to note it about a week ago, it's fortunate that I didn't miss it again.

This year's day of silence also comes at a time where we have much to silently reflect on, as well. Several people assumed that my day-long silence was in mourning for the great tragedy at VA-Tech; in a way, it was.

Here were the cards that I passed out, straight from the day of silence website.

"Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence, a national youth movement protesting the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies in schools. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by harassment, prejudice, and discrimination. I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward fighting these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today. What are you going to do to end the silence?"

I took around a notepad, too, which may or may not have been cheating. My excuse is that I wanted to explain myself a little. The cards, while very good in impressing the seriousness of the gesture on people (important since taking-vows-of-silence-on-dares have gotten popular among band geeks lately), failed to note something essential:

This day isn't just for the gays, people, although it was created by the LGBT community first and foremost. It's a day which stands for the silence of all those who are bullied at school, who hear derogatory terms like "fag" or "chink" or, yes, "nappy-headed ho" directed at them. It is a day for my chemistry teacher's 2nd-grade son, who gets jumped by 3rd-graders on the playground and then asked why he didn't come find a teacher. It's a day which commemorates every person who had to hide some of who they are for their safety, their sanity, to fit in. It's a day that mourns all the countless teenagers who have been driven to despair or even suicide, alone, alienated, silent.

Silences often go unnoticed; today I tried to make my silence loud. So people would notice it. So people would notice others.

* * *

My day began and ended in band, and firstly, let me just say. I've never been so thankful for band. When you can't make any vocal sound (I tried to keep the giggling down to a minimum--for all that, it wasn't an entirely solemn day; I was happy to be doing it and proud to share), it really is something to be able to make a sound on an instrument.

I passed out over half my cards in that band 0 period, not that I had printed too many. I recruited two other participants, both LGBT or allied students. And then I set off for my academic classes.

My English, Economics, and French teachers, I walked right up to, first thing, handed a speaking card and a small note of apology for any inconvenience. Both were fine with it, which made me very glad--especially in French, as that class is speaking-centric and I wasn't sure I'd get permission to basically sit out for a day. I did; it went fine.

For my math and physics teachers, I tried an experiment and just didn't say anything to them about it (pun, ahem, intended). Neither seemed to notice anything amiss--less a reflection on them than on my slightly more reserved behavior in those classes, I think.

People were very interested all day, in what I was doing and why I was carrying around my little notepad. Everyone was very supportive. Varying responses were:

"That's cool. That's really cool."

"Oh man, that's today? Damn. I did that last year. Man, I can't believe I missed it."

"Wow. I could never do that."

The end of the day was so strange, me not talking, a photographer visiting my band class and taking dozens of pictures of me (for the newspaper, heaven knows why), me not being able to explain or say hello, how nice to meet you.

I broke the day of silence--with one other participant, haha--as soon as the final bell rang, and said thank you very much to the photographer. He asked what it was about and I showed him the card and explained a bit. He was very nice, walked with me for a while to see if he could get some more shots. I dunno how photogenic I was, not very, I'm sure, but it was so nice to be able to say thank you to someone, finally.

Oddly enough, that was what kept almost tripping me up. Thank you's and excuse me's. They come from some deep part of the brain stem that is almost beyond voluntary control.

* * *

Whenever you stop and listen for a day, you're supposed to learn loads, or at least hear things you wouldn't normally hear. Here are the things that I learned, and that were different:

(a) Music is like talking; it's so close it almost feels like cheating.
(b) It's really hard to write on a pad and walk and not knock into people.
(c) When you knock into people, it's really hard not to say excuse me.
(d) One would think that having to write down everything makes you more reflective, or at least only say the really important things. For me, no chance. Everything was stupid and irrelevant. It needed to be; that's what I was missing.
(e) Your comedic timing is really thrown off, with the writing. By 5th period, I had it down well enough to know what sort of punchlines, though, could work.
(f) It's funny to see when people notice. I only prewarned a few; the rest got to figure it out on their own. Some kids I see in every class didn't figure it out 'til lunch. :P
(g) Universal sign language is 50% smile, 50% vague hand gestures that could really mean anything at all.

It was a fun challenge, and I hope it raised awareness just a tad, even if only among the people directly around me. If I have free time this evening, I think I'm going to take all the little notes I wrote and fold them into little cranes (the only origami I can do reliably) and give them to people. Just...because.

An intensely long digression.

2007-03-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

C.S. Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism, divides the world into two types of people. "The Few" and "The Many." Good readers, and bad readers. Not--note--not people who read good books and people who read bad books; but into people who read both good and bad books poorly, and people who read good books well, and bad books not at all.

It is with some consternation that I must report that, unfortunately, I have misplaced said book sometime in the past few months, and was quite unable to find it within the 45-second perusal of my room which I like to call "looking for it." This is unfortunate because I wanted very much to use this book to make a point, and now I fear I have lost the point entirely, and the book besides; a shame because it was interesting.

My mother gave it to me; a very slim book it was, about a hundred pages long but with comfortably large type, no more than a pamphlet, white on the front, orange on the back. Paperback. More like a pamphlet. I have no idea how my mum picked it out, knew I would like it--literary criticism isn't one of my more well-known or well-exercised interests. But my mother always picks the right books, books that I want to read, no matter whether I realize I want to read them or not. She says she is something of a idiot savant in book-choosing, using mainly cover appearance to select the best ones. I think of it more like the French sense of the word savant; that her mother's knowledge of my tastes and interests and psychology is so thorough that she can easily and intuitively discern what I cannot even choose for myself.

It's sort of like clothes. I have no idea what looks good on me, and a color that I like to wear may be pronounced a disaster by my sister. But my mother tells me things like "You look good in grey," and, lo and behold, that grey shirt she fancies on me so much garners complements from every quarter.

I know my parents know things. I can't deny it. I'm not so much a teenager as all that.

But I digress. The point, the point, I know. It's here somewhere but without the text in front of me it is exceedingly difficult. In any case. Two sorts of readers.

Now normally my reading is the one thing I have no modesty about, and I would place myself firmly in the "good reader" category, but with Lewis one is not so sure. One comes out of his essay unsure about one's status as a reader; indeed, about everyone, except perhaps Lewis himself. "Very insightful and very annoying," one reviewer has said and with that I concur. I don't know if I meet his qualifications for good reader status. But there is at least one requirement in which I might get an A: the aforementioned re-reading.

I am a prodigious re-reader. Family will attest to my obsessive devotion to the books I know and love; the Harry Potter series, C.S. Lewis's Narnia, Sherlock Holmes. Not just the great stories, though, or the favorite books of my childhood. Everything from humorous essays to science books to parenting manuals have warranted a re-read. There's a certain something, I don't know, when a book clicks with you. One might make the analogy to human relations, to having "chemistry." Great books have chemistry with lots of people, but not all great books have chemistry with all people. For instance, I never clicked with Jane Austen, much as I could recognize her talent. Haven't a clue why. Lengthy sentences haven't deterred me in other cases. But some conjunction of things therein conspired to make us incompatible. Who knows why?

In any case, that doesn't mean that everything I enjoy I re-read. Some things, like most fanfiction or light short stories or pop psychology books, are meant to be read, and that is all. But really almost any book or story that has genuine merit and is worthwhile can be re-read, so I have found. A funny story will be amusing again in the re-reading. A poignant description will recall tears to your eyes easily, perhaps even with more ease than the first time. Even a surprise ending will still bring that little pang of shock to your heart, upon reading again.

That is the one thing people don't seem to understand, but it is true for me, so perhaps that particular peculiarity has less to do with Lewis's good readers and bad readers, and more to do with my eccentricities. A mystery story, for instance. It truly is no less good once I know the ending. In fact, it may be better in the re-reading, because I'm no longer racing through to discover, for instance, the identity of the murderer. The first time I read the Sherlock Holmes story, The Final Problem, I sobbed. Then I read the next story, chronologically, The Empty House, I think, and (spoiler ahead!) I rejoiced. The second time, reading of Holmes's untimely demise and subsequent "resurrection," I cried with equal emotion. My heart gave an equal pang of sympathy for dear, dear Watson as he grabs Holmes's arm with great astonishment and, upon finding it real and solid and alive, faints clean away.

Perhaps it is just the suspension of disbelief which one undertakes whenever one reads a book, but it takes nothing away from these books, for me, when I have read them before and thus know the plot. Indeed, it adds a good deal in some cases, especially with authors who have carefully built up foreshadow and such in anticipation of the climax. When one re-reads The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, discovering every accidental reincarnation of a character who does not make his appearance until book 4 is a pleasure that can only be indulged in the re-reading. These are books that demand to be re-read, that require it, for the full experience. Knowing the hows and whys and whats of how it all fits together do not detract at all from them.

Science is sort of like that, for me; and again I do not know whether it is a peculiarity or deficiency on my part or no. Understanding how something works, and why it is like that, don't somehow take away from its essence, any more than knowing your anger is irrational makes you behave rationally. (Certainly doesn't work for me.) The daisy in my garden is assembled of plant cells, which are passingly well understood, according to instructions laid out in its genetic code, which was obtained via the evolutionary process, which again we understand approximately. It's still a daisy. It still is beautiful. The love I feel for my siblings is biologically programmed into my brain via that same evolutionary process, by selfish genes which recognize (not literally, that's personification) that my siblings share 50% of my DNA, statistically. Knowing this does not lessen my love for them, or make it somehow less important or good, or reduce that indefinable essence.

Nothing worthwhile is so fragile. No book of any real merit is seriously worsened in the re-reading. No phenomenon to which we ascribe worth and meaning should lose meaning upon scrutiny.

Perhaps it is just me, though. I was, after all, always the sort of kid who liked to see how the magician did it better than the show itself. Doesn't that ruin it? my sister or dad would say. No, I would say, rather nonplussed. Magic is entertaining, I like it. Understanding, I far prefer.

* * *

I would leave it at that, except that I get the impression that people will be offended by my insinuation, real or perceived, that I am somehow nobler than they are because I prefer knowledge to mystery. That I, like Mr. Lewis, am dividing humanity into two groups, the more privileged of which I am a member of. This is, of course, not my belief at all. All people like beauty, love, and yes, even magic; and I am not asserting that I find no pleasure in the mystery of not knowing the end of a television show or a detective novel, or no pleasure in the peculiar type of mystery which comes from the people one loves...which one, of course, cannot know absolutely in all aspects, and thus are a constant source of surprise and wonder.

I am just saying...do not fear, so much, the horror that a scientific explanation will destroy the worth of things. The sunset is still beautiful, even now that we know it is not being carried by the sun god's golden chariot. There are valid things to fear about science. Its explanatory power is not one.

We await your owl by no later than May 1.

2007-03-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

It's midnight on a school night, and I just can't sleep; not, in and of itself, an unusual occurence, but it rarely because I am bouncing off the walls in ecstatic disbelief. I can't believe it. I got into MIT and CalTech! Please, allow me one Little Miss Sunshine-style scream.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

A teacher I know very well, and one of my mother's coworkers, commented that it's a little like getting a golden ticket. The metaphor is very apt. In fact, it's a little like opening two unrelated chocolate bars in the same day and happening upon two golden tickets. You can hardly even process having two at once. Too amazing. I dunno if I'll ever feel quite normal again.

* * *

A too-brief thanks is in order, because I know a couple people read this: thanks, mum, dad, everyone who gave me advice on admissions essays, everyone who told me to stop dawdling and get it all in, everyone who gave pep talks when I sighed despondently and bemoaned admissions statistics, everyone who told me I'd do all right. But especially thanks to mum and dad, who've put up with my increasingly testy stressed-out-ness, who've paid for every application, score report, and AP test, and who keep telling me you go where you want, we'll figure it out. I love you guys so much.

And thanks to everyone who's said congrats to me in just the past 2 days: news travels so quickly! Haha, thank youuu, I am so happy to have people to share this with and who are glad for me. (And who know what MIT is; telling kids at school has already necessitated a few explanations. "I got into MIT! And Caltech!" "Is that good?" "...it's kinda like Harvard and Stanford for geeks." "Ah.")

* * *

Truly, I feel like I just got my Hogwarts letter that I've always been convinced got lost in the mail when I was 11. An invitation to a magical, mystical place full of wizards and learning and misfits like me. Except instead of magical aptitude, we all expressed signs of mild social awkwardness and a tendency to spend too much time in the science section of bookstores.

Harry Potter got until July 31 to reply to his admission; I have only until May 1, but I really can't complain. I couldn't be happier. I'm no Hermione Granger, but I feel like she must've, on that day she realized magic was real.

Some day in the not-too-distant future I might be whisked off to one of these places; I can't help but picture sailing on rickety boats over some lake, being hurried, nervous and drenched, into the Great Hall, stumbling up to the front and having the sorting hat tell me where I ought to be...

CalTech, actually, does have Houses, and a Sorting; though I understand it's more of a sorting week than a sorting ceremony. And hopefully no mind-reading hats. But still. The analogy is getting uncanny.

Look mum! I'm not a Muggle after all. :P

just a series of blurs, like I never occured

2007-03-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel like you're the only person in the whole world?

Not, exactly, like the world revolves around you. You're still a tiny, finite, ephemeral person-speck on the face of an enormous blue planet in a massive universe that doesn't really care one way or the other about your star, let alone your species or yourself. It's not a feeling of importance like that.

No, it's more like feeling that your life is a book and you are the author, or the main character; it is only around you that the words unfold. Though events may occur in between the lines and during chapter breaks and off the page, what is truly there, what exists is what you read--what you see. The only things that I know for sure exist are the things that I am looking at, feeling, and thinking about at this second.

Perhaps that is that same feeling of importance, I don't know.

I felt like that yesterday on the bus going to our band competition; when I closed my eyes for a second the entire universe blinked into blackness. Every car we passed, every little old man crossing the street, every bicycle-rider--their life stories seemed only to exist for the brief moment that they flashed past, only because I gave them my attention, and then disappearing again into the abyss only to be called up again when I looked.

Sort of like minimizing a window on a computer. Where does it go to? The computer is certainly not wasting energy rendering it visually for the benefit of no viewer. It is gone until I look at it again.

I was playing on the bus, what I term in my head the Literary Game, in which I attempt to describe the things I see, hear, sense in a rather flowery descriptive literate style, and see which things lend themselves well to description as such. Certain people, objects, and places (regardless of beauty) just must be captured in words; I feel like I'm collecting things, descriptions of things, that I may write into something some day. I remember things best when they're in words, anyway.

For instance, I remember the thin, bored-looking blond woman at the intersection; one hand resting lazily on the steering wheel, the other on the windowsill, cigarette dangling from her fingers. And in my current solipsistic mindset, this is the only moment she ever existed; and if that verbal snapshot were not etched into my memory, she would never have existed at all.

It is a bizarre place my mind goes to, this pseudo-solipsism, and it can be quite happy or quite sad. It is happy when you see a baby smile, as I did yesterday, in a nearby car while staring at us mysterious band kids trundling past in our big yellow bus. (I suspect, though, that every philosophy makes one happy when you see a baby smile.) It is sad when you read the news and feel that you must read every horrible story, note every soldier's name, because it is only you who remembers them and they deserve to be remembered.

I know I'm not the only person in the world. But I am the only person that I am referring to when I say "I," and that is almost the same. I am one point of view out of many, but I'm the only one that I get to experience. My world, if not the world, is of course just a compilation of snapshots, each one my experiences; and my world is the only world I can have.

Our band concert for a moment erased this feeling of aloneness; music does that, a bit. You are simultaneously at your seat, playing, and in the booming bass note of the tuba, on the tinny muted wail of the trumpet, concentrated at the tip of your conductor's baton. If the bus ride gave me a sense of being alone, the concert gave me a sense of being...I dunno. Not many, just...spread out. Blended together. Something.

The bus ride back was strange. Fog, thick fog, of the sort that things just appear out of the mist, startlingly close by, stay for a moment, and then disappear into the clouds as if they'd never existed at all, as if they no longer did. I couldn't see any street signs to tell my dad how close we were. There aren't any signs, I said. There aren't any.

Mmm.

* * *

In other, less rambly news, I got accepted to MIT? I keep telling people that with a question mark, as if I'm not really sure if it's some sort of prank, yet. haha.

Le Pétit Prince

2007-03-06T18:45:00.000-08:00

I read The Little Prince some time ago, ages, ago; but I met him last year or perhaps the year before, in some class or another. It was probably European History; even if it wasn't, that's how I think I'll remember it. That would fit.

I have a beautiful copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, that was my mother's. I am looking at it right now, to write this. On the title page there are the words TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY KATHARINE WOODS. Someday soon I will take my Barnes and Noble giftcard and buy it in French; perhaps I can read it now. My friend, my Little Prince friend, would not approve. He does not like French. He says English is confusing enough for him, thank you very much, you can have your verb conjugations.

* * *

The reason I have The Little Prince in front of me now is because I was looking for a quote to begin a rather boring entry about how I am tired and stressed and sad of late, who knows why. I used my favorite site, quotegarden, to find one, and I saw this:

"It is such a secret place, the land of tears." ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

It is beautiful and very true, but it does not express how I felt today. Last night I felt very like I wanted to cry, but I didn't let myself. This is always a mistake; while I am unable to regulate the amount of sleep I get, my body is acutely aware of when it is getting short-changed on tears. That is not nearly so dramatic or sad as it sounds: just frustrating. Here is the quote for how I felt today:

" I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full." ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I know if I write an entry about this quote, though, I will probably begin to cry, and then I will never finish anything and certainly not my economics notes. So. The Little Prince.

* * *

Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, like mine, came from a different planet than his narrator. They discuss things of great consequence--everything they talk of is of great consequence. The Little Prince only talks of things as if they were of great consequence. They do not understand each other, but they do understand each other.

My little prince friend and I talk about everything; school and philosophy mostly, and how I am feeling and what he is doing. He does not often talk about what he is feeling--that is my language, and occasionally I have to translate it for him. We weave in and out of sarcasm deftly; in and out of subjects abruptly; in and out of vocabulary clumsily. He is an optimist and a realist; I am a cynic and a idealist, or so we have decided. Or so I have decided. I don't think little princes have much need for labels one way or the other.

* * *

The first time that I realized I was friends with the little prince was not long ago. Saint-Exupéry defines his character like so:

"The little prince never let go of a question once he asked it."

This, more than any other single phrase in the English language, I think, describes my friend. He has never dropped a subject in his life, ever. I am well used to him bringing up a question or a point from pages before in our conversation, with no preamble at all, no segue. Now I just answer and on we go, retracing conversational steps sometimes, finding new tangents sometimes, and sometimes hitting on something that one of us really wanted to talk about.

You cannot evade a question, with the little prince; it will come back up, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, probably all three. One must be very careful with one's responses. Whereas normal people take, "Eh, I'll explain later," to mean "I don't really want to and I probably will not," little princes will be around, later, waiting for an explanation. One must be careful.

* * *

It is possible, I suppose, that if my friend is the little prince, that I am the narrator, Saint-Exupéry. When we discuss philosophy, when we agree that grown-ups do not understand anything (present company excluded, of course), it certainly seems so.

However, I think it is far more likely that I am the flower.

" 'This flower is a very complex creature...'

'At night I want you to put me under a glass globe. It is very cold where you live. In the place I came from...'

But she interrupted herself at that point. She had come in the form of a seed. She could not have known anything of any other worlds. Embarrassed over having let herself be caught on the verge of such a naive untruth, she coughed two or three times, in order to put the little prince in the wrong.

'The screen?'

'I was just going to get it when you spoke to me...'

Then she forced her cough a little more so that he should suffer from remorse just the same."

Or perhaps I am the fox.

"'My life is very monotonous,' he said. 'I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life....And then look, you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...'

....

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

'Ah,' said the fox, 'I shall cry.'

'It is your own fault,' said the little prince. ' I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you...'

'Yes, that is so,' said the fox.

'But now you are going to cry!' said the little prince.

'Yes, that is so,' said the fox.

'Then it has done you no good at all!'

'It has done me good,' said the fox, 'because of the color of the wheat fields.' "

* * *

My other friends--and I do have a few! Others, I mean--also often remind me of books, of characters. I suppose it comes of all that reading I did at an impressionable young age. Perhaps I shall explain their characters, sometime.

* * *

I must go now; the Little Prince just signed in on the instant messenger. I will talk to him for a while, and perhaps even get out those tears that I have been putting off for a while now. If I do, I will explain to him--because my being upset disquiets him--how I have felt so on the brink lately, how ridiculous it is that I feel so, how good and necessary those tears are.

He won't understand at all; Little Princes don't really comprehend worries about the future or regrets about the past or fears about the world or other such things. They think mainly of the here and now, and there is a sort of naive but wise optimism about them; a childish certainty that everything will be all right, an adultish certainty that whether it will be or not, one is happiest and sanest if one thinks it so.

We will talk and we will laugh and it will be both frustrating and good for me that one of the only people I talk about how I feel with is also a person who cannot really understand why I feel so oddly. My little prince cannot compound my bad feelings, cannot feed my sadness with empathy, because he does not know how.

"Everything will be all right," he will say for the millionth time, with such sureness and solemnity that one almost forgets he is a little naive blond-haired child, and one can believe that he has fallen from a star.

The first door on the left, next to Hell.

2007-03-03T20:22:00.000-08:00

"Are you talking about the story?"

We freeze, Kristin and I. Or more specifically, she freezes; she was halfway through explaining to me in a soft murmur what my job will be during our lunchtime band meeting. We look at each other with embarrassment, and some guilt.

"I guess not," says Ms. A primly. "We would appreciate it--we're trying to have a discussion, over here, about the story. We would like if you would join in."

Ms. A does that a lot; talk in the royal plural, I mean. But she's right, of course; we are in English class and supposed to be doing something or other connected to this short story, not divvying up band duties. Nor should Louise be doing statistics homework, nor should Ashley be studying my physics notes, nor should the rest of the class be sitting in distracted silence...but true. We should be paying attention.

Kristin's ears turn a little red. Sorry, my fault, I mouth at her, because I asked her the question.

Ms. A is back in her "discussion" now, and I am listening. I was, actually, listening before, but honestly the discussion is not the type that requires one's full attention. I sound like a jerk, saying that--perhaps I am. Even Ms. A, though, was not offering her full attention: getting up, rummaging through her desk, finding papers, organizing things, etc. etc. To assure her that this time I am Paying Attention, I affix her with a burn-holes-through-your-head stare. She is the sort of person who does not believe you are listening if your eyes are not on her head. I make eye contact with people I feel comfortable and respect. I do not often make eye contact with Ms. A.

I should say Mrs. A, she goes by Mrs. and I am not such a wild feminist that I affix a Ms. to your name no matter whether you want it or not. I am just a neurotic who has often addressed a Mrs. with a Miss or a Miss with a Mrs., and I am sick of picking wrong, so I just got in the habit of using Ms. with everyone. G, last year's English teacher, always went by Ms. G, which worked very well. Ms. G used to call me Puglisi, and that worked very well too. I have this thing about first names; they feel very personal to me, like they contain something of who you are. I feel very awkward calling someone by their first name if we are not good friends. It feels way too intimate for that. I liked being Puglisi. It was more respectful than distant. It was nice.

This is all quite beside the point. I am in Ms. A's class now. Here is the point: we were analyzing the short story Rape Fantasies by Margaret Atwood. Our short story unit has been quite hurried, all things considered: we have a schedule, we go home, we read the story, we answer the questions, we come to class, we are divided into groups, we "discuss the questions" which really means all agree on the most respectable answer, Ms. A directs us to answer each question aloud, we start, she interrupts us to talk for a while, we gamely try again, she interjects some more, we finally give up and let her just talk, she asks us why we aren't talking, we sit silently, she is annoyed with us. We have read perhaps 20 short stories this way; each time she is progressively more annoyed. Each time I am progressively more bored.

Ms. A is not a horrible person, but I doubt that she will change this format just because it works poorly for us. I get the feeling that she is just pretending to care what we have to say. Not that I mind lecture; I do not. I do mind lecture that masquerades as discussion, however. Either tell me, or ask me--do not ask me in order to put your words in my mouth.

But again I digress. We are reading Rape Fantasies. This is a very odd short story, about just what it says. There is a narrator, named Estelle, who is talking (to someone, I suppose, but I will go into that later) conversationally about a bridge game with some girl friends of hers. One of them brought up the topic of rape fantasies, and then they take turns describing a few of theirs. Estelle's friends' fantasies are typical, romanticized, bodice-ripper-type stories.

Then Estelle describes hers--and hers are quite different. In hers, she is always set upon by the rapist in some unusual way, and then is able to get out of it rather cleverly, in almost comic ways. In one she asks him to hold her purse, which he does quite politely, and eventually she produces lemon juice which she squirts in his eyes. In another, they both have awful colds, she offers him a tissue, and they end up watching the Ed Sullivan show together instead. In another, his zipper gets stuck and she says, "Oh, honestly," and he begins to cry, and she tries to bolster his self-esteem and eventually gives him the number for her dermatologist so that he might clear up his acne. And so on, and so forth.

The end of the story is rather peculiar, and this is what I have come to class to discuss. At the end of the story, Estelle's already conversational tone becomes quite hurried and almost urgent. She reveals that she is in a restaurant, or perhaps a bar, getting a drink, alone. She knows the waiters, she says, so if anyone were bothering her...well. She explains that in reality, if she were approached by a rapist, the thing to do, she thinks, would be to get a conversation going, to share a bit of your thoughts and your life and your story. So that he knows it's a person, you know? Because she just doesn't see how anyone could go through with it once it's a person who you've had this whole conversation with. That, she just doesn't understand.

It struck me when reading this that she is very probably talking to a potential rapist, here, and the entire story is exactly that--an attempt at conversation, yet another of her quick-thinking scenarios to get out of the situation. I shall not bore you (more than I have already) with all the textual evidence, but this is what I would like to discuss.

In fact, I could not wait until class to discuss it; I pestered my friends with the idea beforehand, getting their opinions, asking them if they had seen it in that light. We had a bit of discussion, ourselves, but we are not sure sure that this isn't just something my brain has invented.

This is why I am slightly bored while Ms. A explains the gender-inequity of rape fantasies to us, as if we hadn't understood it. I confess readily that it is selfish and self-centered of me, to want to talk about my view of the book, what I saw in it, etc. etc. But Ms. A seems eager to share her view of it, and since no one else in the class bloody talks, I figure that I can say about whatever I like.

Except now she has reprimanded me and Kristin for talking while she is explaining how the title "Rape Fantasies" is oxymoronic (she cannot find that word, for ages; I understand what it is like to misplace a word, but honestly). I decide immediately that I will not share my question/observation today. It is petty of me, but I decide it. Although Ms. A doesn't like me, she does like it when I talk, because I am the only person who is able to talk on and on and on. (Not because I'm the most articulate or the most eloquent; I'm just the most tenacious and opinionated--it is difficult to keep on through all Ms. A's interruptions, to be frank. I refuse to accept her opinions as my own without at least letting mine be stated, first.) It is my little revenge, then, not to participate in the discussion at all, today.

They continue to "discuss." (Pardon the scare quotes. I think they are warranted.) It is a very awkward-pause-ful conversation, truly. Not even really a conversation. We have the discussion questions, and Ms. A asks them, and the assigned groups read what they wrote, and Ms. A asks a follow-up, usually...and no one says anything.

The reason no one ever says anything is because Ms. A is always looking for one answer, and we are nervous to give the wrong one. One answer. She often tells us this, when trying to formulate a question. "I know what I want you to answer, I just don't know how to phrase the question..." Ms. A would be good at Jeopardy, I think sometimes. I am not good at Jeopardy, or at giving the answers Ms. A would like. I don't know why. I used to be good at it, very good. Go figure.

This terrible lopsided discussion goes on, and I continue to stare at Ms. A silently. Childish, childish I am. I am paying attention, my stare says, see? Just like you wanted. Now tell me what to say.

We are perhaps ten minutes from the end of the period, now. Ms. A is asking another follow-up that no one will answer. "What is different about Estelle's rape fantasies?"

She is not asking my group. The group she is asking, is silent.

"What is different about them? Is her role different, is the outcome different, what?"

Nothing. Ms. A is getting a little exasperated. Louise looks at me like for God's sake just talk before she starts yelling at us.

"They are different," I say, and most people turn towards me. Ms. A looks over at me--we are at opposite sides of the room, her and I, but we have a clear line of sight and I make direct eye contact as I speak. "They are different because--well, her friends have normal rape fantasies. Rape fantasies are fairly common sexual fantasies, about ten percent of the female population has them, which are characterized by a chance sexual encounter with a man who they do not know, and by sexual submission. Of course, naturally, they are complete romanticizations of the concept of rape, but they are fairly common." I pause, and continue; my tone is very cool, and I do not mean that it is neat. "Estelle's fantasies, however, are completely different. Firstly, they aren't rape fantasies per se...there is actually no sexual component. Secondly, they are not fantasies of sexual submission--actually, by talking the man out of it, or otherwise gaining control of the situation, Estelle actually asserts a position of dominance. So she actually reverses the roles. Rape is an act of control and dominance, not sex--as the sort of naive fantasies of Estelle's friends would imply--and Estelle's fantasies turn around that paradigm."

The bell rings. We put the books back and sit down. She likes us to sit down so that she can hold us a minute or two before we go every day. I think it's a power thing; if it makes her feel a little more secure in her position in the classroom, fine. My physics class is pretty close anyway, I won't be late.

I duck out of that classroom as quickly as possible. "God," I seethe to my friends quietly, "I just wanted to show her that we understand this stuff; it's not our fault that we aren't speaking up, no one can get a word in edgewise."

We walk past my sophomore English classroom, the door of which we referred to as the portal to Hell because that class would literally destroy your soul.

"Are you sure A isn't worse than R?" Louise asks me, as if I have some special say in the rating of teachers. The R she refers to is the inhabitant of that special hellish classroom which sits right next to the hellish classroom we had just departed from.

"Getting closer," I say grimly. We hurry along to physics. It takes until lunchtime, though, to recover from Ms. A. It always does.

*ETA: On second thought, names have been omitted to protect the innocent and not-so innocent...the latter, of course, being myself.

Three things I learned from Ms. R

2007-02-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

I had a teacher, once, who taught me three things, worded exactly like so:

1. A semicolon separates two independent clauses.
2. Man is inherently evil.
3. If you highlight something, you know it.

I try to learn something from all of my teachers, even if it's something so bleak as how-not-to-be-a-human-being, so here it goes. What I learned from Ms. R:

~*~*~*~

1. I learned the semicolon thing quite well; I use them near-constantly now. Of course, I read Emma by Jane Austen that same year; that probably helped as much as anything; I counted an extremely robust seven semicolons in one sentence that spanned the entire length of a page and a bit more. Remarkable, remarkable. Wherever I got it from (normally I would assume it was the reading, as what I read affects my style in general, but a few years of French and I have become much better at cobbling abstract grammar rules into something useful), that, I learned. Moving on.

2. This one was a lot harder for me to sit still and listen to, I confess. In that year, sophomore year, we read the books The Pearl, Lord of the Flies, and Night; we read short stories of the To Build a Fire and The Lottery type. There were two things we read that I liked that year, Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter which convinced me that Mr. Dahl's writing for adults was as splendidly twisted as his writing for children, and the poem A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes.

I'm digressing madly again; I have a tendency to think of my English classes in terms of literature instead of what we actually did--the books stay with me longer, except in the case of Ms. G, but that is another story.

Most of the year was spent on Lord of the Flies which, if you do not know it, is a symbolism-heavy little book of the sort where everybody dies. (Apologies for spoilers: I had it spoiled for me, at my request; "Should I get attached to anyone?" I asked in the shorthand of people who are wont to cry over books; "No," someone a year older than me said emphatically, so I didn't.) This book was the ultimate proof of Ms. R's thesis that all man is inherently evil--a claim she did not make with qualifiers such as "in the context of the book" or "in William Golding's opinion" or even "it seems to me that." No, "Man is inherently evil" was repeated with the same bleak certitude as "Use a comma after a coordinating conjunction."

Well, stylistically, the coordinating-conjunction-comma is going out, and I couldn't believe her about the philosophy, either.

I remember she gave us one essay to write about babies or small children: are they good or evil, do you think, she asked. No fence-sitting, she insisted, they can't be both, and I swore. Well if they bloody well are both than your false dichotomy isn't going to change anything, you nut! (Pardon me, I was somewhat upset. I don't like to lie in essays; it's harder than just telling what you think.) I wrote that babies were good and perfect and I just barely avoided saying they were as close to God as we ever can get. My parents never impressed into me the doctrine of original sin (I thank them for this very much; I didn't need one more thing to feel guilty about) and they are both very close to Buddhists or Humanists or heaven-knows-what-ists, so it is a natural and easy position for me to take and one that I pretty much viscerally believe. My parents worked with small children a lot, and apart from one or two little psychos (I mean it affectionately, sometimes even they were all right, really), I found plenty of evidence to back up my position, which wasn't exactly my opinion, but close enough.

Nice try, Ms. R wrote on my essay, and it was war. She had the more impressive ammunition, naturally, striding back and forth in front of the class, delivering loud hear-it-down-the-hallway lectures about how babies are evil because they are entirely selfish and children are nasty because they need to be forced by society to share and to not hit and otherwise not be little tyrants. Ms. R didn't particularly like children--she told us this candidly, while speaking of her two grown-up twin girls. She likes them much better now as teenagers; as toddlers they used to hold their breaths until they turned blue and fell over.

Perhaps I am unkind to Ms. R, perhaps she was not trying to impress upon us the doctrine of original sin as much as trying to remove from us the doctrine of the Noble Savage, the theory that in the natural state man has no war and no evil and no fighting and no unpleasantness at all. I would respect that goal--Stephen Pinker's books have installed in me the thought that the Noble Savage is an overly-simplistic concept based on a denial of human nature. Human nature, which is a product of evolution and contains "good parts" and "bad parts" but really just is what it is, anyway.

What it is, said Ms. R, is evil, and that is that. Evolution too was tied into her convictions, evolution that she said only produced selfish, survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog animals. I read The Selfish Gene that year too. I wished I'd had Dawkins around to explain for the eleventy-millionth time that selfish genes don't necessarily imply selfish creatures; that genes for empathy and altruism exist and can be an evolutionary advantage as well.

Back to Lord of the Flies. The boys (and they were all boys, which I thought was telling, but Ms. R never mentioned) of course descended into absolute chaos--because, Ms. R told us, of the absence of the society that had kept them in check. The, and I quote, "thin veneer of civilization was peeled back to expose their true savage natures underneath."

Hobbes, I thought, and I wondered if perhaps she though a monarchy would keep it all in line so much better. I never was a Hobbes fan.

On the topic of Lord of the Flies, my mother commented to me that she thought it was really much more about what happens to young boys when they're in those old-fashioned English schools where the older boys can beat the younger boys and the whole thing is just a cycle of misplaced revenge. That made a lot more sense to me. I read Boy, by Roald Dahl, again that year.

My resistance was subtle and consisted of making the best arguments I could--not to her, but to her students, my classmates, everyone who she'd ever tried to impress this idea upon. I often take up the position of Devil's Advocate, but I think that time would be more aptly named Angel's Advocate, or Man's Advocate, or something to that effect. I don't how much I had to do with it, but by the time we got to 11th grade English we were a little terrorized, unduly skittish ("Do we put our name on it? MLA or standard? Do we have to spell out the date? American form?"), but only one or two of us really believed anything she'd said. I dunno if she was trying to inspire critical thinking, or whatever, but there was a lot of thinking that was critical of her in that class, this I know.

3. Highlighters, I have found, distract me utterly and on occasion I actually retain less highlighted text than normal text. I learn in full sentences, not fragments; this is why I'm crap at taking notes. Sigh.

"You can call me Al"

2007-02-03T11:28:00.000-08:00

Next year, I get to vote in the Democratic primary—and, god help me, I’m excited. Call it youth or naïveté or some brief lapse of cynicism, but voting is new and shiny and oh, how I’ve wanted to! A million days of campaigning and polls and debates are still left, but it’s sort of like the race for ASB President these days: all image and publicity and multi-coloured flyers.

There are about a million days, pardon my hyperbole, left until they are actually voting, but since candidates are trying their damnedest to be on the news and my computer and in the paper and on the blogs, I’ll go ahead and look at their stances on issues as of now.

My dad asked, probably facetiously, why in heaven’s name I would vote on issues—but really, what else is there, personality? Eloquence? Values? I would like a charming, well-spoken, non-philandering president, of course, but ultimately it’s not the tabloid-worthy escapades or amusing malapropisms that matter.

What I would like to vote for is a vision and world-view similar to mine, a similar appraisal of the path to that “better America” that I know we all see as our goal. But politicians are good at what they do; painting a broad vision that can include all. Yes, I’d like a better economy, healthcare to improve, the war to be over, more money given to this or that, less government corruption. I am promised it left, right, and center.

It’s the specifics that we disagree on, the small shuffling steps or death-defying leaps to that splendid but vague future goal. These specifics are the issues on which I plan to base my votes, and that, dad, is why I don’t care that Obama is eloquent or Clinton is stuffy or Edwards is boyish or Vilsack has a snowball’s chance in hell.

That said, here is a splendid site to find where the potential candidates stand on anything and everything.

Regarding one issue near and dear to my heart, sadly, I can’t seem to find one major candidate who is personally and morally pro-gay marriage. Wait a minute, I sound entirely too reasonable. WHAT THE HELL, PEOPLE? Not even one? HOW can you claim to be “for equal rights” and in the same breath “not necessarily for gay marriage?!” Clinton offers domestic partnerships; Edwards assures us that he believes marriage is between a man and a woman, but no hard feelings; Gore has mentioned civil unions; Obama “opposes gay marriage; supports civil union & gay equality,” whatever that means. So, four separate-but-equal proposals, including some “leave it up to the states” cop-outs.

(You know who supports gay marriage on the federal level, noting that it’s unsafe to leave civil rights issues up to the states? Al Sharpton. Whose name I know solely because of this interview with Rev. Sharpton, which the Daily Show bravely conducted EVEN AFTER Sharpton had cancelled. Ahhh, what perseverance!)

mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau!

2007-01-31T21:25:00.000-08:00

My mother asked me what existential angst was, really was, today; for someone who spends a fair amount of time pondering (or wallowing in) it, my answer was strikingly unsatisfactory. Here are my thoughts on the matter and existentialism in general, more or less in terribly rambly style. Such is the nature of my philosophy, cobbled-together and disconnected and utterly unintelligible.

* * *

My French teacher's explaining Sartre to our class had to be one of the most intellectually exciting experiences I've had throughout all of high school--it's up there with learning pathos, ethos and logos, and with a few debates between me (playing, for the sake of the argument, a Utopian Socialist) and some kid in US History (playing, for the sake of the argument, a Social Darwinist libertarian--that is what happens when you get two Devil's Advocates together). In any case, Sartre via Monsieur Mac struck me about as strongly as anything that wasn't in a book or music or my parents has ever struck me.

How M. Mac explained it (he had to switch reluctantly to English halfway through, due to our blank looks) was, first and foremost, that we are all completely and entirely alone, and secondly that we can never get away from other people. I like paradoxes, so I hung on as he continued.

We are alone, he said, because ultimately we exist as and only contain ourselves. I only know my own thoughts and feelings and perspectives on the world; I am only sure that I am real (if one will even accept that premise, which I will, cogito ergo sum.) We are all, apparently, driven by this intense feeling of loneliness, or more accurately aloneness. But no matter how desperately, achingly we desire true companionship, the combining of two souls into one oft mentioned in marriage vows, we can not. There is always a chasm.

The image I thought of--perhaps it only works for me--is your hand and my hand, palm to palm. We can touch them together and press for all we're worth, get them as close as it is humanly possible to get, and yet my hand will never know what it feels like to be your hand; they will never be feeling exactly the same sensation, they will never be one.

I believe, for most people, the ultimate one-becoming is the expression of romantic and sexual love, and in this I find a beautiful kind of sadness. Ultimately, it is like the two hands: close, but not close enough, together, still alone. That we are all lonely creatures wandering about, trying to fill this void, is an intensely powerful image to me. I do not know if I misunderstand the philosophy, but there it is.

I imagine this is where a goodly portion of said angst comes in, that loneliness.

The second thing, as I mentioned, was that we can never get away from other people. Sartre wrote in Huis Clos, "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or, roughly translated, "Hell is other people." My french teacher explained it like so--in French, even, so I'm working now to translate it and make sense of it in English:

Freedom, real freedom, is entirely within your grasp. (Ms. Gillet, my English teacher, used to say something like this--"No one can make you do anything," she said.) Freedom is simply the freedom from letting others' judgments of you affect you. Not giving a damn what anybody thinks, in other words, pas la société, not society, not anyone. In existentialism, there is no God nor absolute morality: so you have your own morals, I suppose, and then there are others'. Acting regardless of the others', that is freedom--and, one would imagine, since freedom is such a positive word, happiness.

Of course, no one can; none of us can escape the judgments of society and others, and none of us can help caring, at least a little bit. Even Sherlock Holmes, who cares not for laws nor policemen nor being anywhere close to "normal" by anyone's standards--even such an independent person as he can never resist a bit of a flourish when revealing his solutions to cases. Never can resist astonishing people a little.

Hell, then, is other people, because as long as we let others define us with their judgments--and we must needs let them, we are only human--we are not free, we cannot define ourselves.

This lack of freedom, dependence on others: stop two on the existential angst express.

I will miss this French class mightily.

* * *

Personally, existential angst for me is a lot about death. Don't worry, I'm far from depressed, but one can hardly help but ponder it when it occupies so much of literature and the news and even plain old day-to-day idioms. I'm dying of hunger. It won't kill you. Or one that's gaining ground, among my friends, as a general expression of concern and good wishes: e.g. "Achoo!" "Don't die!" As if we could help it!

I know how I deal with things that are too much for me: I rationalize. This is why I was fairly articulate during that kidney stone--my alternatives were (a) notch up the vocabulary to intensely verbose and detached, or (b) not cope at all. This is much the same.

Rationally, I prefer the premise of a finite life to an infinite afterlife: I prefer it logically and viscerally, the latter seems nonsensical and abhorrent to me. I have come to terms with that, somehow, on some level; understanding that in order for this all to matter as I want it to, that I must inevitably shuffle off this mortal coil, and that indeed I must anyway. It has made me that much more aware and even happier: there's always a certain relief in not being able to do anything about it, no matter what "it" is.

Despite all this, I do--and I confess, I did this even when I was younger--lie awake at night and imagine what it is like to be dead. It is, naturally, impossible. One can imagine the world going on, but one cannot take one's perspective out of that imagining, which is of course exactly what one would need to do. And back to the loneliness, again. I have but myself and with that my perception of the world. What have I, when I have not myself? Naught.

Too much Shakespeare, apologies: but oh, see pretty much anything Hamlet says for more existential angst. He's a bloody bundle of it.

But anyway, this mental exercise inspires in me a great feeling of terror and uncertainty. Not insignificance, exactly--that is reserved for when I try and conceptualize the size of the universe, or the world, or just my city, or all the people in a crowded room.

That too, I suppose, is existential angst, and that is what I understand of it. There you are, mum, and in the likely event that I don't know anything at all, here is what Google had to say:

* * *

Search term: "existential angst is"...

...reading a book about the meaning of life and then doing gym homework.
...one of the three corners of the Existential Triangle along with the People as Scenery theory and the Anthropic Fallacy.
...beige.
...frequently written off as a rite of passage to young adulthood.
...totally a reason to call in sick.
...is not uncommon, if not quite "normal."
...nothing new; we are now much better at acting it out.
...not exactly gripping dramatic television.
...hardly worth the effort.
...subjective reaction to an incomplete perception of reality.
...a real pain in the ass, you know?
...not treatable with short-term remedies.
...a start, it lays bare what we are up against.
...pacified with soothing iTunes lullabies.
...universal.

Naught but the children of an idle brain...

2007-01-21T18:23:00.000-08:00

I was napping and thinking of the following--no wonder I can't sleep:

I don't buy karma. I wish I could; it's a really nice idea, that kind of cosmic what-goes-around-comes-around which sort of implies that the whole universe works how it should and that people are rewarded or punished according to their actions. But no, I can't believe it, and here is why:

Bad things happen to good people.
Good things happen to bad people.
Random things happen to people without any seeming relation to their relative goodness or badness, unless of course they are being rewarded or punished with respect to their past lives, in which case I like the idea even less.
It implies that if we leave the whole thing alone that it will just work out all right. A comforting, optimistic idea, but it is pragmatic pessimism with regard to the fairness of the universe that prompts the creation of earthly justice systems.
It seems like an easy idea to see confirmed by only looking at positive results. Someone says something mean, they trip and fall, we smirk and think "Karma's a bitch," and believe that the cosmos really is balancing things out. We disregard, of course, the twelve other times we've seen someone say something mean, and nothing happened.
It makes me feel guilty when bad things happen to me, which, I gather, isn't particularly useful. If good things happen to good people, then you must be a good person if good things happen to you, and vice versa--sounds just a little like Calvinism, and though I admire the Protestant work ethic, the idea that miserable people deserve it somehow rankles me.

Is it possible to be a complete cynic and yet believe very strongly in giving everybody the benefit of the doubt, as much as possible?

Chapstick is addictive, and not in a good way--in a way that creates in you a chapstick dependency which can only end in you putting the horrid stuff on every 42 minutes or despair.

A law in my state has been proposed that would outlaw the spanking of children under three years old. There is a flurry of fear about the "nanny state" and government intervention in parenting. I am nearly a libertarian--about social issues, not economic--and all about not legislating morality. But this law seems at least slightly reasonable to me. I don't know. My thoughts:

I don't really think parents should hit children at all. I never was spanked, or hit, or even grounded, to my recollection, and I think I really turned out all right, with no discipline issues that I can recall.
I have met, in my schooling, several kids who I would have wanted/found it necessary to hit.
I have also met several who, in discussion of the issue of parental discipline, recalled stories of being spanked with tennis rackets and chased around the house by drunk uncles who couldn't, my friend earnestly related to me, tell the buckle end from the belt end.
It is interesting that several people who would gladly "legislate morality" regarding, say, the proposed law in North Dakota which would make it illegal for unmarried couples to live together, are very opposed to this law. I suppose God didn't say "Spare the rod, spoil the child, unless they're under three years old, then it's just ridiculous."
It's a completely unenforceable law, and just because we have child abuse laws doesn't prevent it.
I can't remember anything from before I was three (except my sister's birth). Not a thing.
I have no children and thus probably shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on the issue anyway. If I had a three-year-old who was constantly sticking his hand into electrical sockets, my ideas might be entirely different.
In all the polls I have looked at, an overwhelming 90% or more of people strongly believe that parents should be allowed to spank 3-year-olds, as long as they are not abusive. I must say, I am surprised at the overwhelming majority; it distresses me a little that the only thing 90% of people can agree on is hitting children...
Stuff like this convinces me even more that I should never, ever, ever have children, because there are apparently so many more complications than the normal fears of screwing up a little person's life forever.

"Studying for government" can mean: (a) watching old people argue on CSPAN, (b) catching up on the political blogs, or (c) looking for old clips of The Daily Show. MOO HA HA HA. Studying for calculus is consistently less fun. Studying for English is impossible. Studying for physics is unnecessary because we're still working with NEWTON and it's what, January? Studying for French is sorely needed. Studying for band is ridiculous...and yet still sorely needed.

Correction: I am an idiot, it is Horatio who is alive at the end, not Laertes. I KNEW THAT. (<---lie.)

Words, words, words

2007-01-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

I was nominated in, competed, and won (apparently) my division in the qualifying round for the Bank of America scholarship--something of a big deal at my school, or so I am told. It seems a rather big fuss: all that happened was they corralled the twelve of us into a room, got us to write a 1-minute speech in 45 minutes, and then had us give it, and then participate in discussion. Short, sweet, altogether tense.

I got to keep my paper, so here's what I said. The topic was on 9/11, homeland security, wiretapping and surveillance, the right to privacy, the fourth amendment--the prompt was "should the government be able to impinge upon the fourth-amendment rights and the right to privacy in the name of homeland security?" My speech is hardly stellar; it is overly verbose to show fluency of vocabulary and pronunciation, but whatchagonnado?

* * *

September 11th changed everything. Even now, there is still a gaping crater in the American psyche, much like the one in lower Manhattan. The United States lost its sense of security on 9/11, lost the illusion of impenetrability afforded by two oceans, a formidable military, affluence, and success. Instead, we were left with terror.

After that date, our leaders bade us return to our daily lives. And we tried--oh, how we tried! We shopped, we worked, we stilled our trembling nerves and seized our suitcases to board airplanes again. But despite this, something was missing: our feeling of safety.

That missing sense of safety is why we passed the Patriot Act, why surveillance cameras and roving wiretaps have become part of America's vernacular. We seek to protect ourselves from the nebulous foe, to make our country safe once more.

Unfortunately, that safety is an illusion. We were not safe then, nor are we now, and no matter how many liberties we sacrifice--privacy, free press, habeas corpus--we shall never again regain that blissful ignorance. And even if we could, we should not be willing to sell our nation's founding principles in exchange. Benjamin Franklin himself once said, "Those who would sacrifice a little liberty in exchange for a little security deserve, and will get, neither."